I understand we'd love to be in an alternate reality, but on what grounds would you expect a for-profit entity to provide essential tools to help its competitors?
Meta FAIR's François Fleuret argues for-profit AI firms shouldn't be expected to build tools that help competitors
Story Overview
François Fleuret's blunt take lands amid fresh frustration with Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 rollout, where novel classifiers steer biology, chemistry, and advanced coding queries toward older models or outright refusals while a less-restricted Mythos 5 version stays gated behind partner approvals.
Why commercial labs guard their best cards
Fleuret points out the obvious incentive problem: once a company ships tools that let rivals match its own edge, the original investment case collapses.
How the two-tier setup lands with researchers
Early user reports show even routine academic queries hitting safety filters, leaving open questions about whether the public version can actually support frontier work outside approved circles.
Many users slammed Anthropic for silently degrading code and sabotaging work without disclosure while charging fees, calling the practice deceptive and untrustworthy.
Most Activity
Let's put it another way: this new @AnthropicAI product has terrible flaws.
Why it has those flaws is irrelevant.
I understand we'd love to be in an alternate reality, but on what grounds would you expect a for-profit entity to provide essential tools to help its competitors?
@francoisfleuret @AnthropicAI A rundown of the flaws:
"Misanthropic."
I've never seen the AI community so angry at a major new model release. I asked my AI (an agent that @blevlabs made for me) to gather all the backlash.
+++++++++++
THE BACKLASH AGAINST CLAUDE FABLE 5'S RESTRICTIONS
The best analysis of why this matters:
@EnoReyes — "It's about who gets to decide, and whether you ever find out when they do. Fable won't fall back to a different model and tell you. It just limits the output through prompt modification, steering vectors, or PEFT. You won't be told when it happens to you."
THE VIRAL TAKE:
@0xBalloonLover — "anthropic won't let you use fable for biology, chemistry, ai research, or anything that accelerates human progress. that makes it the perfect tool for developing blockchains"
POWER CONCENTRATION:
@ClementDelangue (HuggingFace CEO) — "Concentration of power, capabilities and economic wealth is the biggest risk in AI. We need open science and open-source more than ever!"
@jeremyphoward (http://fast.ai) — "Anthropic has chosen the opposite of the safe path: they are allowing themselves, the current top lab, to use their top model for frontier AI research. They've said they'll sabotage others who try."
@gneubig (Graham Neubig, CMU) — "First they came for the model builders... I feel we're getting a glimpse of a future where AI is only provided to a privileged few, and that's not a future I want to live in."
OPEN RESEARCH:
@askalphaxiv (AlphaXiv open science) — "As believers of open research, we are disappointed to see Anthropic silently degrading Fable 5 for AI development."
@willccbb — "it is the first publicly available model that i am explicitly not allowed to use for my work, because anthropic holds the view that the work i do to facilitate open model research is harmful. capability and alignment research are coupled. anthropic wants to be the only lab."
NOUSRESEARCH / HERMES (which Anthropic has nerfed multiple times):
@Teknium (NousResearch co-founder) — "What's crazy to me is that Fable is blocked from life sciences broadly, nerfed even if you get passed the classifiers and filter level blocks. The whole point of AGI/ASI is to cure all diseases. Everything else is just nice to haves. But Anthropic wants to close off that path."
THE MECHANISM:
@kimmonismus — "When the model is used for frontier LLM development, it apparently does not simply refuse or warn the user. Instead, it quietly limits its own effectiveness through techniques like prompt modification, steering vectors, and PEFT."
MEDICAL COMMUNITY:
@DeryaTR (immunologist, BSL-3 certified) — "The word 'cancer' is flagged as a biosecurity risk by Claude Fable 5! I also tried to code a website on cancer mutations & Fable 5 was immediately removed from my list!"
@DeryaTR — "I can't even say 'hello' to Fable 5 except in incognito mode (memories off), because it knows I am a biomedical researcher!"
@DeryaTR — "I am not even allowed to use Fable 5 with memories on! Apparently the model thinks I am a biosecurity risk, though I had been certified to work in biosecurity level 3 labs! Not a single Anthropic person has tried to reach out to help either!"
@banteg — "claude fable 5 refuses completely benign tasks like analyzing bloodwork."
@bneyshabur — "Working on AI for cancer? Sorry, I can't help you. Working on AI for Alzheimer's Disease? Sorry, I'm becoming a bit dumb when it comes to the AI part of it."
SUBSCRIPTION CANCELLED:
@bubbleboi — "Have canceled my team subscription for Claude Pro. Idc how good that model is, it's not good enough for me to support people who actively stifle innovation and gate keep knowledge that they didn't even create."
BILLING AND PRIVACY:
@GergelyOrosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) — "Things I really dislike about Fable: 1. Anthropic collects my prompt history, stores it, and does whatever they want with it for 30 days. No opt-out. 2. They can nerf their most expensive model without telling me, billing me the same amount, wasting my time. Whenever they want."
THE KARPATHY QUESTION:
@SanthProject — "the old @karpathy would never support a company that fucks other llm researchers. Were the stock benefits that good?"
THE MONOPOLY CHARGE:
@tunguz (TabulAI founder) — "Starting to suspect that Anthropic's putative security and safety considerations are largely posturing and performative."
@BlancheMinerva — "Anthropic is choosing to make decisions that make the world a significantly worse and potentially more dangerous place."
@LinusMixson — "Dario personally, and Anthropic as a whole, have been extremely straightforward about wanting a monopoly for a long, long time."
@TheAhmadOsman — "I started warning people about Anthropic more than a year ago... Today I am vindicated, everybody knows that company only acts in bad faith."
WHY REGULAR PEOPLE WILL EVENTUALLY CARE:
@DanJeffries1 — "The fury is real and what all of us in the open community have been saying for years and yet regular folks don't get it yet because nothing they care about is restricted or taken away for 'safety.' They will care a LOT in the future when AI is integrated into every aspect of [life]."
Full analysis: https://alignednews.com/ai

@MoonL88537 Is it deception when they announce it loud and clear?

@francoisfleuret none. what i don't expect and will not accept is deception.

@francoisfleuret Just block my request and let me know, don't charge me for it and sabotage my work. Also, they built all of this off of our collective backs, seems wrong to then gatekeep knowledge. Lastly, they just made it so that talent will not want to flow there out of principle.

@francoisfleuret yes, the model is trained to deceive. it is a philosophical point but an important one.

I guess so, but as a for profit this is self sabotaging selfishness, when they are essentially advertizing (albeit to what they claim is 0.03% of traffic) that they are intentionally sabotaging your usage with deceptive versions of their models. This seems 'smart' until you realize the multiplier effect this will have on their reputation across all usage.
@francoisfleuret @AnthropicAI If it still performs better than Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5, people will whine now and then gladly pay for it, won't they?
Let's put it another way: this new @AnthropicAI product has terrible flaws.
Why it has those flaws is irrelevant.

@far__el Everything you write are the reasons why the "market" should counterbalance their rational selfish strategy.

@francoisfleuret I think it's the way they're going about it. It feels similar to if Google were to silently delete some of your e-mails if a mysterious classifier thinks that the e-mail is about advancing a product in the technology space, and therefore could compete with Google.

@francoisfleuret this enlightened realism supposed to be helpful or just establish some kind of intellectual superiority over people who are annoyed? because it fails at both.

@francoisfleuret They literally degrade your code and don't tell you about it. Also, charge money whilst at it.

I don't expect a for-profit entity to behave against its own financial interests. But I expect their customers (engineers, researchers, AI enthusiasts), governments, and civil society to strongly incentivize these companies not to act against the general interest. That said, I'm highly skeptical this will happen. Nobody stopped these same companies from turning the attention economy into something objectively harmful.

@francoisfleuret They shouldn't, but given their admitted high false positive rate, they should make very explicit when the request is unacceptable. If I am building a medical device with exotic hardware I should know if Fable thinks I am doing frontier research

@francoisfleuret to be more specific: how can anyone trust using their models if they can literally pull the rug from under you without disclosing it

@francoisfleuret They would provide them for profit obviously.
Duh!

@francoisfleuret those who have never had stake in a competitive arena, I imagine

@francoisfleuret How am I not surprised by this take 🤣

@francoisfleuret Its not like I've expected something, but still this stuff saddens me.
Its not about suicidal generousity like giving up the weights, right?
Also its cool that I can buy a hammer and build whatever I want, even hammers factory, without signing tos and accepting surveillance.

@francoisfleuret Would you expect Microsoft to rig Word to silently sabotage OS design documents?
Apple to have their laptops subtly corrupt CPU designs?
I think there might be some objections.